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David Herbert Lawrence, novelist, short-story writer, poet, and essayist, was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England, on September 11, 1885. Though better known as a novelist, Lawrence's first-published works (in 1909) were poems, and his poetry, especially his evocations of the natural world, have since had a significant influence on many poets on both sides of the Atlantic. His early poems reflect the influence of Ezra Pound and Imagist movement, which reached its peak in the early teens of the twentieth century. When Pound attempted to draw Lawrence into his circle of writer-followers, however, Lawrence decided to pursue a more independent path.

He believed in writing poetry that was stark, immediate and true to the mysterious inner force which motivated it. Many of his best-loved poems treat the physical and inner life of plants and animals; others are bitterly satiric and express his outrage at the puritanism and hypocrisy of conventional Anglo-Saxon society. Lawrence was a rebellious and profoundly polemical writer with radical views, who regarded sex, the primitive subconscious, and nature as cures to what he considered the evils of modern industrialized society. Tremendously prolific, his work was often uneven in quality, and he was a continual source of controversy, often involved in widely-publicized censorship cases, most famously for his novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). His collections of poetry include Look! We Have Come Through (1917), a collection of poems about his wife; Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (1923); and Pansies (1929), which was banned on publication in England.

Besides his troubles with the censors, Lawrence was persecuted as well during World War I, for the supposed pro-German sympathies of his wife, Frieda. As a consequence, the Lawrences left England and traveled restlessly to Italy, Germany, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, the French Riviera, Mexico and the United States, unsuccessfully searching for a new homeland. In Taos, New Mexico, he became the center of a group of female admirers who considered themselves his disciples, and whose quarrels for his attention became a literary legend. A lifelong sufferer from tuberculosis, Lawrence died in 1930 in France, at the age of forty-four.

Apocalypse (1932)Democracy (1936)Etruscan Places (1927)Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922)Letters (1932)Mornings in Mexico (1927)Movements in European History (1921)Pornography and Obscenity (1930)Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921)Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine (1934)Sea and Sardinia (1921)Selected Literary Criticism (1955)Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (1991)Twilight in Italy (1916)

Brooding Grief

A yellow leaf from the darknessHops like a frog before me.Why should I start and stand still?

I was watching the woman that bore meStretched in the brindled darknessOf the sick-room, rigid with willTo die: and the quick leaf tore meBack to this rainy swillOf leaves and lamps and traffic mingled before me.

This poem is in the public domain.

This poem is in the public domain.

D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence, novelist, short-story writer, poet, and essayist, was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England, on September 11, 1885. Though better known as a novelist, Lawrence's first-published works (in 1909) were poems, and his poetry, especially his evocations of the natural world, have since had a significant influence on many poets on both sides of the Atlantic.

Ah, my darling, when over the purple horizon shall loomThe shrouded mother of a new idea, men hide their faces,Cry out and fend her off, as she seeks her procreant groom,Wounding themselves against her, denying her fecund embraces.